Just £1 each - it's a snip for this glimpse of paradise

Friday 14 November 2008 08:27 BST

Diana and Actaeon: as William Hazlitt said beholding it, 'a new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new Earth stood before me'

On Monday evening, as the rain lashed down and a chill wind blew through the darkened streets, I braved the elements to cycle into Trafalgar Square. Once there I strode between the porphyry columns of the National Gallery, took a sharp left up some stairs, and all at once found myself in the warm sunlight of an early summer afternoon somewhere in northern Italy. Better still, right in front of me was a stone archway, beneath which a number of beautiful - and naked - nymphs were disporting themselves.

To the right of the nymphs an imperious figure was seated, one of her outstretched feet was being towelled by a female attendant, while a second - a beautiful black woman in a striped robe - clung to her back, both protecting and restraining her. The goddess - for clearly she was one - held a cloth up in front of her face, and from behind it directed a gaze at once furious and coquettish at the interloper to the left of her grotto.

I felt as if I were that interloper, a dark-haired, lithe young man with a quiver slung around his shoulders and a hunting dog at his feet. Like him I was simultaneously enthralled by the beauties before me, and appalled by my own trespass. I was but the latest of the many thousands who, together with Actaeon the hunter, have come upon the goddess Diana, bathing with her nymphs, and shared with them a moment that has endured for nearly half a millennium.

Completed between 1556 and 1559, Diana and Actaeon is regarded as the apogee of Titian's late period. Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery says: "(It) is the most sensuous of all Titian's paintings, also the most subtle and disturbing in its dramatic character - tragic but with touches of comedy, exciting in its colour and unforgettable in its range of expression. If we define a masterpiece as a work of art that repays the return visit, then no painting is more deserving of this description."

For me it was the ease with which I could access this profound aesthetic experience that thrilled me most: no ticketing, no preamble - one moment I was in the chill evening, the next in the warm bower.

Sitting with me on the bench in front of Diana and Actaeon were two others, a man in his thirties in bomber jacket and jeans, and an older, smartly dressed woman. Both were gripped by the painting, their eyes roaming over the brushwork, but when I asked them whether they thought the taxpayer should stump up the funds required to buy it for the nation, they became effusive.

"Of course we should find the money," said the man. "It's sublime - it's the fluidity of the movement that gets me. I mean, I'm an Arsenal supporter and this reminds me of when they're playing great football, all those bodies working together."

The smartly dressed woman concurred: "It should definitely be ours - I've been sitting here for over an hour, completely absorbed."

Even if these two were self-selecting Titian fans - and while I was there they were joined by a third, a portly gent in a pinstripe suit - the enthusiasm with which they all began chatting was striking. It was as if their mutual admiration for this very intimate painting licensed their own spontaneous intimacy.

Diana and Actaeon has been in Britain since it was purchased by the Duke of Bridgewater in 1789; his descendant, the Duke of Sutherland, is its current owner, and has for many years lent it to the National Gallery of Scotland. However, the Duke now wishes to sell and has offered Titian's masterpiece to the nation for £50 million, approximately a third of its estimated market price (estimated, because old masters of this calibre are available for sale so infrequently).

Understandably, with the storm clouds of recession gathering, there is going to be a gut feeling that the last thing the Government should be spending our money on is an expensive daub, no matter how great. However, the sum needed has to be put in context.

For a start the National Gallery has been vigorously fundraising already - it has raised a definite £4.5 million from private sources, secured a record £1 million grant from the Art Fund, and has good reasons to hope that this, together with the support it has applied for elsewhere, will take the gallery to within £10 million of its target of £50 million. It only needs the total to be committed by Christmas in order to keep the painting - the money doesn't have to be paid in full for a further three years. This isn't a case of the Government bailing the gallery out - it and its supporters are rising to the challenge as well.

In the past decade of boom, we've become accustomed to hearing about funny money being shelled out for peculiar artworks. Now it seems that in common with other asset bubbles, the contemporary art market is about to go "pop". But it's important that we don't confuse artworks that have yet to pass the test of time with those, such as Diana and Actaeon, that have triumphantly done so. The prices for contemporary art were jacked up by speculators who at root didn't care if they were buying Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull or blood diamonds from Africa; moreover, their investments were destined for locked vaults, or private mansions.

By contrast, Diana and Actaeon will belong to all of us, be available - and free - for all of us to view. Londoners in particular will benefit because the painting will be shared, on a five-year rotation, between the National Gallery and its Scots counterpart. This will cost less than £1 per head of the population, a sum that if it were amortised over the next half millennium would be effectively nothing at all. When William Hazlitt beheld Diana and Actaeon more than 200 years ago, he felt as if "a new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new Earth stood before me". For Lucian Freud, it and its companion piece Diana and Callisto are "quite simply the greatest paintings in the world".

This consistency of approbation, together with the grand narrative of the painting (it and its six companions were based on Ovid's Metamorphoses), has led to a consensus: this is a visual artwork to stand comparison with a Shakespeare play or a Verdi opera. In Britain we have one of the finest collections of publicly accessible Titians - he is a painter who has had a profound influence on domestic masters such as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Turner.

Barbara Follett has been in post as Minister for Arts for little more than a month, and saving Diana and Actaeon would be a bold stroke. It may be that she's the woman for the job, since although she began an art degree herself, she was compelled to give it up and work for a bank. Now's her opportunity to do the reverse, and help us take a little bit back from the banks to give Diana and Actaeon to the nation.